Category: To Occupy my Time

28 June. Five pictures from my Washington DC trip.

Also known as the “wander” day.

I started with church at All Soul’s Church, Unitarian, in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. I walked there from Jenna’s place and enjoyed seeing the urban setting. Adams Morgan reminded me of Boston, a bit.

Church was great. Their choir was small (perhaps a summer choir) and had the most amazing cantor. I connected with the sermon, At Theodore Parker’s Grave, in which the minister “outed” himself as a Unitarian nerd. You can listen to it by going here and scrolling down to June 28.
After church I wandered down to the start of my walking tour through DuPont Circle and Kalorama. On the way I discovered this Adams Morgan Heritage Trail, which I followed for a bit. I wish I would have known about these Heritage Trails in the planning stage. I would have made a point to follow them. There are nine of them! For those who are planning trip to DC, you can find the information here.
On that trail, I saw this spot. You may not recognize it right off, but what if I said “March 30, 1981?” How about “Washington Hilton?” What if I said “John Hinckley?”
Did you get it? It is the site of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan!

I had some time to kill, before I went on the Textile Museum’s tour, so I spent it in this park, reading. That was a nice respite.
There are tons of huge houses in this area. Most are embassies, but you could purchase this one for me, if you would like.

Also on this day, I visited the Phillips Collection and Jenna and I went out to dinner at the Brickskeller Inn, where they have a multi-paged beer menu.

28 June 2008. A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

We did a lot this day: trip to Tata, delicious lunch, nap for the jet lagged traveler, tour of the city, tour of the Palace grounds by night. I put up a lot of pictures from the day last year, so it wasn’t so terribly hard to choose this one.

I. Love. Hungarian. Food. I could happily eat it for the rest of my life. I like cabbage, I like sausage, I love goulash, I love saucy things with various forms of meat on noodles. I like pork. Their food is delicious and was a highlight of my trip.

27 June. Five pictures from my Washington DC trip.

Eastern Market, Congressional Cemetery & Smithsonian Folk life Festival

Jenna (my roommate from the Electric Ave. house in Somerville) picked me up at the airport, drove me to her place in DC, set up a very comfortable inflatable mattress and went out to purchase my breakfast items the next morning. What a host.

After breakfast was taken care of, we set out for Eastern Market. The market had just reopened after a renovation due to fire, and was very crowded. We wandered through the flea market where I bought an awesome photo. I would like to buy more photos from this vendor, but there is no information along with the photo about how to do so. Also, the photographer’s signature is not legible. I just searched through all of the Eastern Market vendors listed on the website, and can’t find this one. The first name looks like it starts with an “M” and the last name an “R”. Maybe someday I will figure it out, but until then, I will have to remain content with the photo I have.

Jenna and I ran into her sweetheart Gus (proving that the biggest city is a small town,) and the three of us went to lunch. Afterward, we walked to Congressional Cemetery.

There seem to be a lot of cemetery references on the blog, lately, but what can I say? They are just such cool places. Some highlights:

Cenotaphs. When members of congress died in Washington DC they were buried here, or transported elsewhere and memorialized here. Back in high school, my friend Heather and I were big fans of Henry Clay. We thought he should have been president. So it was pretty exciting to see his cenotaph. This design was used until 1870, when the practice was discontinued.


I love the sculpture of this marker.

Tom “Gator” Swann isn’t dead yet, but he wants you to know he is a proud gay veteran.

This was my favorite grave. You can’t see it very well in this picture, but this says:
RUTH ANN
OVERBECK
Look it up!
Librarian

Just for fun, I just googled her name and came up with the woman herself. How exciting.

After the cemetery, Jenna and I bid adieu to Gus and wandered through Wales at the Smithsonian Folklife festival. We saw this famous Welsh cook show us how to make vegetarian sausage. She was quite funny and the food looked delicious. She was not allowed to let the audience taste the food, a fact which she lamented several times.
Having our fill of Wales, we went back to Jenna’s where we cooked an amazing dinner and hung out in the rooftop garden.

It was a lovely day.

27 June 2008 A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

June 27 was that weird, arriving super jet-lagged day. There aren’t really pictures from that day. So this is today’s picture.
I’m not a world traveler. Before I went on the Hungary/Romania trip in 2005 the only foreign country I had visited was Canada. (Lovely place, by the way.) So for me, one of the most interesting things about traveling is to see what is different from my own home, especially familiar things. When I lived in South Boston, two friends from Idaho visited me and one of them was delighted to come with me to the grocery store because she was interested in the different brands/prices/displays. We had a grand time comparing and contrasting. Similarly, when my Aunts and I visited Lanai, Hawaii, one of my favorite things was visiting the cemetery. The grave decorations were very different from any cemetery I’ve ever visited.

So toilets. I hadn’t ever thought that they might not be the exact same as the porcelain thrones we use here in the USA. Of course, I had heard tales of holes that you squatted above, and not-good plumbing and such, but I figured any culture that had a plumbing setup similar to the US would have the exact same toilets.

But they are different in Hungary and, I have to say, I like the design better. As the picture above shows, the hole in which everything exits the bowl is in the front of the bowl, not in the rear like our setup. Also, note that there is only a tiny bit of water in the toilet bowl itself. This eliminates the whole splash back thing that I think everyone probably experiences and no one talks about. Then, when you flush the toilet, man what a reaction! All the water in the tank comes rushing down with a very loud noise, and whoosh! everything is gone.

So toilets. Different. Better. I could write a whole different section about light switches (square, large toggle) but I’m staying true to my one picture per day.

26 June. Five Pictures from my Washington DC trip.

The plus of digital cameras is that you can take as many pictures as you would like. The minus is that you come home from a vacation with 700+ pictures that you then have to decide what to do with. In these blog posts of my trip to Washington DC, I am hearkening back to an era when six rolls of film seemed a bit excessive for a seven day trip. I am limiting my pictures to five per day. So we begin.

The first day of the trip. The day of travel. Not much to look at here, in fact, the act of getting to my destination was so boring I only have four pictures.

I spent a lot of time in the Detroit airport. My layover was so long that my flight wasn’t even posted on the board when I wandered up to my gate. So I walked the entire length of the terminal. Ostensibly, I was looking for the best place to buy food, seeing as how the airlines can’t be bothered to feed you anymore, but really I was killing time. The time-killing allowed time for pictures, so all of today’s selections are of the Detroit airport.

One of my favorite games to play in airports, is “beat the person walking on the people movers.” Basically you go somewhere with a people mover, you let an unsuspecting person in front of you get onto the people mover and then you walk alongside the people mover, attempting to reach the end of your non-moving sidewalk before the other person reaches the end of their moving sidewalk. Let me tell you, it isn’t very hard to beat people. People spending time in airports are generally very. slow. walkers. Because I had ample time to play this game, I let some of them get a very big start. But I almost always beat them. People who don’t walk, but stand on people movers? I could probably do cartwheels down the terminal and still beat them.

The Detroit airport isn’t super memorable, but this fountain was nice. Also note that if you don’t want to walk the whole length of the terminal, you can take the shiny red train from one end to another. As someone whose gate is always at the exact end of the terminal from which I am currently standing, I can say this train is a very good idea.
A fun surprise as I sat next to the fountain were these rocks. They were in a planter, and I first thought they were intentionally written on, but I realized later that the whole thing most likely happened organically. Someone with a Sharpie wrote something on a rock and someone else followed suit. Most of the things seemed to be of the advice type and it was fun to see the different languages represented.

If you are a pressed penny collector, the Detroit airport is for you! Washington DC? Not so much, as it turns out. Detroit had three different pressed penny machines–the good kind, where you get to turn the crank yourself. I didn’t have enough change to get one at every machine, but I’m happy with my “Model T” and “Motor City” designs.

Thus concludes the first day of vacation.

26 June 2008 A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

I never got the blog posts done last year for the trip to Hungary and Romania I took with the YRUU youth last year. So this year, I am posting one picture from each day of the trip. It isn’t the full travelogue, but it is better than nothing. Pictures might be a spectacular photo, or a not-so-spectacular one that encapsulates one aspect of the trip for me.

Today’s selection:

We flew out on June 26 and arrived in Budapest sometime on June 27? I don’t know, the length of travel time, plus the time zone change has me confused. So this picture isn’t really from June 26, but it was kind of like June 26 because we had magically crossed many time zones over many hours. At any rate, upon arrival, we were tired. We were so tired that Eric and Christine fell asleep on the bus from the airport to the church. I was so tired that when I met my host family, and they asked me what I wanted to do, my answer was, “Eat and then sleep.” Because they were such a gracious host family, we did exactly that.

Metro!

I’m trying to be a good tourist (and history major) and read up on the things I will visit when I go to Washington DC. I’ve found a very nice site on the history of the Metro. It isn’t super wordy, and has a trove of great images, such as the one above which was a bond referendum poster. You can read all about the history of this transit system by going to: http://chnm.gmu.edu/metro/index.html

It’s especially fun to compare the planning maps to the current one.

image from: http://chnm.gmu.edu/metro/popup/bond68.html